An enterprise scanning system implements protocols that allow for entities to easily route documents that enter the system via a scanning device according to rules determined by system administrators and/or users of scanning devices. An example enterprise scanning system is Distributed Scan Management (DSM) implemented by Microsoft and deployed in Windows 7/Windows 2008 Server R2.
An enterprise scanning system that is implemented using DSM (a “DSM system”) allows a user to authenticate user data via a DSM scanning device and to select from one or more sets of post scan processing instructions that are made available to the user. A set of post scan processing instructions (PSP) contains instructions for routing acquired documents, including one or more destinations to which acquired document data should be sent. For example, a PSP may indicate that acquired document data should be emailed to one or more email addresses, copied to one or more specified file servers, uploaded to one or more specified websites, etc. A PSP may also include, among other things, settings for scanning data such as color style, scan resolution, file format type, etc.
After a user is authenticated and has selected a PSP, the user may scan document data into the system at the DSM scanning device. The DSM system processes the scanned document data according to the selected PSP.
DSM systems do not allow data acquisition in manners other than via scanning. This limitation of the manner of introducing data into a DSM system limits the usefulness of processing document data using the DSM system. It would be advantageous for a DSM system to allow users to introduce document data for processing by the DSM system from both scanners and other types of input sources external to the DSM system.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.